Congressman — Is This The Hill You Are Prepared To Die On?

Anyone who has ever listened to Dr Laura Schlessinger knows what it means when she asks the question, “Is this the hill you are prepared to die on?” The question asks if this issue is so important to you that you are willing to risk all — even your life — upon it.

Late Friday night, by a vote of 220-203, the Democrat controlled House of Representatives — with eight Vichy Republicans joining them — voted to [politically] die on the Hill of manmade global warming and a Cap and Trade (Cap and Tax) Bill that will devastate the American economy and destroy American jobs.

As pharaoh said, “And so it is written, and so it is done.”

And now begins the task of cleaning up the effluvia and detritus that will be the logical and inevitable result of this legislation. Waxman-Markey — and it is no irony that those two liberal politicians come from the two states most likely to be the orifice of choice in a national enema — is nothing more than a huge national tax on productivity.

Regardless of the speculative, and somewhat dubious nature of the evidence that man is capable in any way of impacting the weather worldwide, the cornerstone of the Anthropogenic global warming one-world government crowd, the Waxman-Markey Cap and Tax legislation will do absolutely nothing except raise energy costs, raise taxes, raise unemployment, and lower the standard of living of all Americans. The proponents of the bill — the true believers who insist that AGW is real and we must do something to save the planet from ourselves — admit that if successful [another dubious assumption] it will impact global temperature by 0.2 degrees — in the next thirty to fifty years.

Green initiatives already tried in other nations have demonstrated results — results that Congressional Democrats could have look toward to see the future their Cap and Tax scheme will bring to this country — with devastation to the economies and standards of living there.

“Think of what’s happening in countries like Spain, Germany and Japan, where they’re making real investments in renewable energy,” President Obama told Congress back in January. “They’re surging ahead of us, poised to take the lead in these new industries.”

A recent report from Spain, a country that went green nearly a decade ago, demonstrates how wanting a policy to work does not necessarily translate into a working policy.

“The study’s results show how such ‘green jobs’ policy clearly hinders Spain’s way out of the current economic crisis, even while U.S. politicians insist that rushing into such a scheme will ease their own emergence from the turmoil,” said Dr Gabriel Calzada, author of the study. “This study marks the very first time a critical analysis of the actual performance and impact has been made.”

The report highlighted the fact that the very model that President Obama touts as a framework of what his program can do in this country, has been shown to be a dismal failure in Spain. For every renewable energy job created in that country, 2.2 other jobs were lost. Spain now enjoys 18 percent unemployment — double the average of the rest of the EU — an unemployment rate the United State might soon look upon with envy.

Furthermore those created green jobs, only a fraction of which are permanent, or about one out of ten. Of even more concern than the job loss of such “green” initiatives, is the cost of same.

In the Spanish model, with subsidies, each new “green” job cost taxpayers about $774,000. Wind jobs cost an estimated $1.3 million each.

“The loss of jobs could be greater if you account for the amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to higher energy prices,” Dr Calzada recently told Bloomberg News.

Conservatives have warned of just such a scenario in opposing the Cap and Trade scheme passed by Congress. Industry dependent upon energy will leave our shores for India and China, or other nations not bent upon economic suicide.

“The price of a comprehensive energy rate, paid by the end consumer in Spain, would have to be increased 31 percent to begin to repay the historic debt generated by this rate deficit mainly produced by the subsidies to renewables, according to Spain’s energy regulator. Spanish citizens must therefore cope with either an increase of electricity rates or increased taxes (and public deficit), as will the U.S. if it follows Spain’s model,” Dr Calzada’s study concluded.

In this country we can expect both higher energy costs and higher taxes to pay for both the “green” economy that President Obama and the liberals in Congress envision — and the Socialist cradle-to-grave government care they have set out to enact.

With passage of the disastrous legislation in the House of Representatives, it now falls upon the Senate to call a halt to this insanity. If lobbying efforts by the people upon our representatives was important, efforts to influence our Senators is now paramount.

The “cup and saucer” approach to our bicameral government provides the people with a certain “cooling off” of the fires of populism seen in the House of Representatives — at least in theory.

For 220 members of the House of Representatives, Cap and Trade was the hill on which they were willing to stake their political lives. It is now our task to make sure that our Senators understand that same choice now awaits them

And if that choice be wrong, it is up to us, WE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, to make them pay the ultimate political price.

**NOTE: If you make use of an electronic spell checking device as I sometimes do, it will attempt to correct the term “detritus” to “Detroit” — an irony not at all lost on this writer.